*
Chela puts on some music. It’s Tracy Chapman. Pina likes the song ‘Fast Car’ because that’s exactly how the camper goes. Sometimes, if the journey is really long, her dad says, ‘OK, enough, right?’ and changes to his Mozart CD, which has a dinosaur sticker on the case. Pina put it there because it’s old-fogey music.
‘Mozart is just baroque oom-pah-pah,’ Pina once said, and her parents had fallen about laughing. She knew that what she said was funny because she’d heard someone say it during one of Aunt Linda’s rehearsals, and everyone had fallen about laughing then too. The truth was, she didn’t know what it meant.
‘Don’t mess with my man Amadeus,’ her dad had said.
Now Pina wants to ask if he remembers, but she can’t be bothered to raise her voice over the roaring camper. Sometimes, even without the roaring, Pina can’t be bothered to speak. She doesn’t like breaking the silence. Like a bubble she can choose when to burst, or like the highway ending, she prefers to put it off. Sometimes it’s not possible, because the air is heavy after a row and it falls to her to come up with something else to add to the air to clean it, even if she doesn’t want to. Sometimes she knows even before she tells a joke that her parents aren’t going to laugh, but she tells it anyway. Because when there’s a dirty silence in the car or at home, it doesn’t matter if the joke is any good or not: her parents just won’t be in the mood. But she has to tell it anyway, like covering a stain with a doily. Just as people on the news go on hunger strikes, her parents go on long laughter strikes. And Pina often goes on talking strikes. She’ll only talk a lot with Ana, and occasionally with her dad, who asks her lots of questions. With her mom she won’t talk so much because whenever she tells her anything it’s as if Chela knew it already.
From her position stretched out on the backseat, Pina turns to face forward. The buckle on her safety belt digs into her but she tells herself to put up with it. She wraps a blanket around her and feels better, but now she doesn’t see the landscape as it whooshes by so the road is pretty dull. She changes position again, now in a grump. Then she raises her feet and presses her toenails to the window. It’s cold. When she takes them away the mark is left on the condensation. It’s like leaving footprints without having to go anywhere. When they disappear, you just put your foot back. When it gets too cold, you put your foot back under the blanket. It’s like her mom, who comes and goes, and then, just when Pina thinks she’s not going to remember her anymore, comes back. She spent a lot of time this weekend thinking about that. Because of the fight, of course, but also because of the floor all around the pool. It was made of clay paving stones. When the soaking-wet kids ran past they left their footprints there, and then, gradually, the footprints disappeared and it was as if they’d never been there. Pina thinks that the boy who scratched her hand the night before isn’t as bad as the other boys. The other boys from Planet Earth.
She sleeps for a while, and when she wakes up the sun is coming up. They’re parked up by the side of a tollgate. Pina sits up and looks out the window. Her mom is buying a cup of coffee and her dad must be in the bathroom because she can’t see him. She puts her mouth up against the window the way her mom hates. When she sees her, Chela points to her polystyrene cup, which is her sign for, ‘You want one?’ Pina shakes her head. Chela shrugs her shoulders twice, which is her sign for, ‘Your loss’. Pina counts the things around her. There are five people at the food stand: two of them are vendors and they’re wearing aprons and puffy, layered skirts. There are four cars at the tollgate: one of them is a truck and another has bicycles tied to the roof. There are three dogs loitering around the stand. There is one dad coming out of the bathroom. Chela points at her cup, now facing Beto, and he shakes his head. Chela gives another two shrugs. Pina thinks, ‘Coffee strike.’ There is one dad, one girl, and one camper waiting for one mom who’s chatting with the two vendors.
*
They set off again. It’s light now and they’re getting close to the dip in the road that Pina always dreads, but at the same time craves to see; from up there you can see the layer of scum you’re heading into. Mexico City sits waiting under the scum. Mexico City lives under the scum. Sometimes a few towers or roofs might poke out from beneath it, but in general, in the first hours of the morning, the scum is sealed: like something you could bounce up and down on. But it does let you in. The scum swallows you and makes sure you forget all about it. This is its chief characteristic: as soon as you enter the scum, you stop seeing it. Pina knows this, and yet she struggles to believe it every time she’s there on that slope, looking down on it; at how thick, how gray, and blue, and brown it is, and semi-solid, like a dirty meringue. She just can’t believe she’ll forget about it. And she tries to keep it in sight for as long as possible, but the scum always disappears eventually. Only once or twice, around mid-morning in the schoolyard, has she thought she could make it out above her, high, high above the school, blurring the outlines of the taller buildings. Pina greets it quietly: ‘Hello, scum.’ According to Theo, Mexico City kids have that scum in their lungs, and they pollute the places they visit just by exhaling.
About halfway down the slope, the camper pierces through the scum. It disappears in an instant. Pina is doing everything she can to keep the scum in sight — ‘see it, see it, see it’ — when her mom lets out a scream. The camper lurches, then carries on as if nothing had happened.
‘What the fuck?’ her dad says.
‘A bathtub! There was a bathtub!’ her mom answers, pointing to a spot that’s impossible to make out among the trees and going at that speed. At the first chance she gets, Chela comes off the highway and starts driving up and down side streets. Beto asks her to get back onto the highway. The sudden change of direction has riled him: he wants to make it to the office on time. Chela ignores him. Pina pinches herself. It starts to rain. Theo would say, ‘That’s the scum peeing on us.’
*
They spend a long time swerving puddles and stones, none of them saying a word, and with the music off. Despite herself, Pina starts to think her dad is right and that her mom just imagined the bathtub. But she doesn’t say anything because she’s on opinion strike. Her mom says she didn’t imagine it, that they should leave her alone, that she’s going to find it. And she does. They turn a corner and there it is, clear as day. All the houses in the street have either gas tanks or water tanks or plants on their roofs. Except for one, which has a bathtub on it: it’s filthy and old, and has gold feet.
‘It’s got lion feet!’ Chela says, as if this made up for the horrible hour they’ve just spent looking for it. And for a second Pina expects a burst of laughter; silently, she tries willing her dad to laugh like he did when Chela bought the camper, so that the three of them can all burst into an infectious, unifying fit of hysterics. But her dad just says, totally dry, ‘De-lux.’
Chela parks up behind a driverless taxi and gets out of the camper like she knows where she’s going, protecting herself from the rain with her flimsy cardigan. She looks a bit weird with her flowery dress in this place were the taxis live. Pina gives herself permission to talk again.